Out of the eight photographs that I found, seven are of the interior of  the house and the eighth photograph depicts the overgrown exterior. The  only image depicting a person shows my grandfather just as he walks into  the kitchen. He looks out of place in his crisp, white shirt, summer  tan and immaculately creased trousers. Leaning casually against a  doorpost (maybe for support? His legs and back were worn out from years  of manual labour), he looks straight at my grandmother, at the camera,  at me.

When reading the headlines of the newspapers visible on the floor, it is  evident that my grandparents are not only standing in the remains of a  personal history, but also that of a shared cultural past. The disarray  depicted in the images is almost pleasant to look at, a sombre mosaic of  disorder with several strands of time intersecting. Somehow, it feels  as if the images depict my grandfather´s interior landscape. In the  photographs the ravages of time are on full display and artefacts from  different time periods intermingle. What, if anything, would my  grandfather have recognised beneath the layers of dirt? Would his hand have remembered the touch of the doorknob as he entered? Were there  scratches or marks that he could have derived back to some distant childhood memory? These are questions that photography can evoke, but  fail to answer.

Since its invention, photography has become a useful tool in our  effort to imagine the past. Modern history is cluttered with captured  moments on paper and on hard drives, and our understanding of the past  has subsequently gone through a radical change. Photographs give the  impression of a more densely populated time sphere, as though more  events have taken place since the camera was invented. It is hard to  imagine a world without photographs today. When imagining the past, whether it´s World War II or events from our own personal past, we rely  on photographs to help us do so.

However, in recent years the photographic image as document has been  under questioning, which has weakened its status as “proof”. From this  scrutiny, a greater understanding of the choices a photographer makes  and how different technical and practical variables influence the final  image has emerged. (3) Despite the questions that have been raised,  photographs have not been deemed unreliable or obsolete. On the contrary, a discussion regarding other types of information that could  be extracted from photographs has taken place. (4) By taking  photography’s material and performative aspects into consideration, a richer understanding of our past can be had. We have simply gotten  better at asking different types of questions when engaging with  photographic material.

When interacting with my grandparents’ photographs, the prints have  been an important source of additional information. The backs of the  photographs have started to yellow, particularly around the edges. The  surface of each photograph has a high gloss and when tilted, marks and  scratches and fingerprints become visible. This suggests that  photographs have been used, but used carefully, respectfully; they have been looked at and they have served some purpose.

In the photographs, I not only see my grandfather and the dilapidated  house; I see my grandmother before me. She was famously tardy when it  came to taking photographs; with her feet firmly fixed to the ground,  eyes squinting, fingers sprawling, elbows pointing out, she would be  deeply immersed in the act of photographing. Despite her careful  composing and time-consuming efforts, the images were often out of focus  and with the occasional blurry finger intruding in the corner of an  image.

Nostalgia is an important component of retrospection, and therefore of photography. In her book The Future of Nostalgia (3),  Harvard professor Svetlana Boym investigates how nostalgia permeates  our culture and how it has historically emerged as a force during times  of social and political turmoil. Boym traces the origin of the word  nostalgia to the Greek words nostos, meaning return home, and algia meaning longing.  (2) Since the term nostalgia was first coined in the late seventeenth  century, it has held different statuses. Today, particularly within the  artworld, displays of nostalgia, with its sentimental softness and  passive yearning, are almost taboo. But to disregard nostalgia´s  influence in society and inherent presence in photography would be to  disregard something intrinsically human. At best, nostalgia has the  capacity to unite us in the common experience of longing. At its worst,  nostalgia can divide us on the question of how to return, and what to return to. As Boym points out, it is when the nostos takes over and one tries to recreate the past that it can become a dangerous force. (3)

At first, nostalgia was considered a contagious but curable disease, best attended to by medical doctors. But, as Boym writes; By the end of the eighteenth century, doctors discovered that a return home did not always treat the symptoms. (3)

Even then, they realised how nostalgia was dependant on distance to  thrive. Eventually, nostalgia as a phenomenon was left to philosophers  and poets to ponder, becoming one of the characteristic elements of the  Romantic era.

It was towards the end of this epoch that we saw the dawn of the  photographic medium. Early pioneers of photography, like Julia Margaret  Cameron, David Wilkie Wynfield and Robert Adamson were all heavily  influenced by the Romantic movement and helped establish a bond between  photography and nostalgia. In fact, nostalgia seems to overlap with the  basic structures of photographs on several levels. Both deal with  distance in time and space to their subjects, and both can give the  appearance of representing the past accurately, but are traitorous in  the way that they warp our perception. Perhaps the most significant  similarity between the two is how they both generate an impulse to  preserve, to keep the memories of the past sealed up, fixed. The  nostalgic builds a shrine to the past within himself. Photographs become  external artefacts in correlation to this inner shrine, both triggering  nostalgia, and keeping it alive.

To help define the mechanisms of nostalgia, Boym poses an open-ended question in her book: “Can one be nostalgic for a home one never had?”  (2)

In 2012, Tate Modern re-published Tales of Tono, a classic  photo book by Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. (6) The book relays  Moriyama´s efforts to create a sense of home using photography. It was  first published in 1976 and mainly contains black and white images, and a  few in colour. The images are grainy, some unsharp and with few  straight lines in them, as if they were taken in haste. A newly written  text by Moriyama was included for the new edition of the book. In the  text, the ageing photographer looks back on his younger self, reflecting  on the desperate state that he was in and what made him make a book  about Tono, a town he had previously never set foot in. Having had a  father in the military growing up, Moriyama moved around a lot as a  child. As an adult he longed for a hometown to return to, not feeling  quite at home anywhere.

He soothed his yearning by looking at maps, always keeping one close  at hand. At night, he would study them when the rest of the house was  asleep, overcome by a sense of absence. Onto the surface of the map,  with its different colours and lines, dots and signs, he would project  his longing. He was, in Boym’s words, “…looking for a spiritual  addressee.” (3) If my grandmother´s images put emphasis on the return home, Moriyama´s work delves into the longing part of nostalgia.

He decided that it was in Tono that he would find what he was looking  for. In his text he asks himself why it had to be Tono. It was  partially due to the mythical narratives surrounding the city, he  writes. In a book published in 1909, also titled Tales of Tono, Japanese  ethnologist Yanagita Kunio had collected folklore tales from the  residents of Tono. It was with these tales in mind that Moriyama set off  to Tono by train in 1976.

At first, Tono seemed to match his expectations of what a hometown should be, serene, peaceful and bathed in light. But soon a question  stared nagging within him: “Is this really what I want?”, admitting,  “This is a bit extreme. The place evoked a feeling of annoyance.” The  dilemma of nostalgic longing is painfully felt, even though Moriyama had  no real memories of the place. His experience accurately illustrates  Boym´s thoughts on modern nostalgia, saying that it is defined by “…a  mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an  enchanted world with clear borders and values.” (2) Contrary to  philosophers, who strive to be at home everywhere (2), the nostalgic  wants to perform the impossible and attach his or her longing to a  geographic location, to animate place with myth and experience,  to shelter it from the present. In his book, Moriyama shines a light on  the intricate web of fantasies and distortions associated with the nostalgic impulse, as well as with photography.

For years, professional photographers have tried to emulate the  aesthetics of the snapshot, highlighting what were traditionally  considered to be errors, perhaps few better than Moriyama. Although  their prerequisites are vastly different, there is a kinship between my  grandmother´s images and those of Daido Moriyama. There is a nerve and  directness to the snapshot, something that has proven effective in  dealing with a vernacular subject like home.

With artworks masquerading as amateur snapshots, the professional  photographer can communicate new and exciting ideas through a familiar  and accessible style. Given enough light, a camera will record  everything that it is pointed at. This “point-and-shoot” mode of  operating a camera allows for a loss of control associated with the  amateur photographer. It highlights the camera’s influence over the  final result. The snapshot is not a meticulously composed image where  every detail has been reflected upon, it is an impulse, a spur of the  moment thing. With this approach, the camera captures things that are  beyond the photographer´s intention. I doubt that my grandmother found  the newspapers or tins of cat food on the floor of the house important  when she took the photographs. Yet, they are there in the photographs,  and they inform my reading just as much as anything else. For an artist,  the use of this method can be a way of inviting an element of chance.  Some would argue that it’s even a way for the photographer’s  subconscious to play a part.

In his text, Daido Moriyama describes an inner conflict between his  emotions about Tono and the reality of Tono itself. This gap can be said  to be one of the main characteristics of nostalgia. As soon as you turn  to the origins of your longing, your vision of the place is challenged  and starts to be taken apart in a painful, and perhaps sobering,  encounter. Both the photographer and the nostalgic deal with details,  neither too concerned with the bigger picture. They preserve only what  they need and leave the rest. They are dependent on the frame, that some  things are visible, while other things remain hidden.

Nostalgia is said to be history without guilt. (3) Depending on how  it is used, photography holds the possibility to problematise  nostalgia´s promise of a guiltfree past. Photography can make it harder  for us to overlook and forget prior fallacy and error, but still only  show fragments.

Photographs have shown great elasticity when it comes to the  production of meaning. Depending on their context, photographs can be  corrupted and made to tell almost any story. It is therefore vital that  we have the knowledge to pose informed questions when dealing with  photographs, to understand how they operate and relate to the past.

The nostalgic impulse seems to stem from a discontent with the  present, be it on an individual or collective level. In the past,  nostalgia has been proven to emerge as a strong force in times of  political and social upheaval. We rely on photographs to help us make  sense of the past, and to make substantiated decisions for the future.  But what can one really learn from looking at photographs? In her book,  Boym points out that the mere act of preserving something from the past  does not automatically mean that it becomes useful to use to  us, saying “Atlantis was not a “golden age” to be reconstructed but a  “lost civilization” to engage with through ruins, traces and fragments.”  Perhaps what is left out of the images is of equal importance, and the  ability to forget as vital to face moving forward? Nostalgia is not  intrinsically good or bad, it is deeply human to succumb to reminiscing,  mourning the loss of possibility, what once was that no longer is.  It’s not simply a person or a house that one is nostalgic for, it is an  enchanted context, a deeply felt connection to a natural order of  things. Nostalgia is made up of fragments, and photographs are indeed fragments.

There is no way of accurately rendering the past, and the invention  of photography has not changed that. Left unchallenged, nostalgia’s  tinted vision of the past can lead to some very narrow interpretations  of our histories. Why, what and how we save, and how we contextualise  that material are still relevant questions. Photography has given us a tool to look back at the past, a tool that we are still trying to comprehend.